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WASHINGTON – Donald Trump is lying about his Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt.
Again. And still.
Going on five years from the day he riled up a mob of his followers by telling them they would lose their country if they did not march on the Capitol and pressure his own vice president and members of Congress into overturning the election he had lost, Trump continues to lie about it, this time with a conspiracy theory that the FBI actually instigated the violence.
“It was just revealed that the FBI had secretly placed, against all Rules, Regulations, Protocols, and Standards, 274 FBI Agents into the Crowd just prior to, and during, the January 6th Hoax,” Trump posted to his social media site Saturday. “That’s right, as it now turns out, FBI Agents were at, and in, the January 6th Protest, probably acting as Agitators and Insurrectionists, but certainly not as ‘Law Enforcement Officials.’”
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Trump’s claim is false. The agents were dispatched after Trump’s mob grew violent, attacking police officers and storming the building.
Ty Cobb, a lawyer in the White House Counsel’s office in Trump’s first term, said Trump was obviously trying to rewrite history to make himself a victim on that day, rather than the singular villain, as was determined by both the House Jan. 6 Committee and a Justice Department special counsel.
“It has gone better than I would have imagined, but I don’t think it works long term,” Cobb said of Trump’s whitewashing campaign.
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Trump’s White House did not respond to HuffPost’s queries.
Kash Patel, who for years spread lies about Jan. 6 and even helped some of Jan. 6’s most violent cop-assaulters record and release a version of the Star-Spangled Banner with Trump, is now the FBI director.
Saturday night, eight hours after Trump’s post, Patel put up his own, which in part corrected Trump’s claim about the timing of the agents’ deployment, but which nevertheless concurred that it was wrong.
“274 FBI agents were thrown into crowd control on Jan 6 against FBI standards,” he wrote. “That failure was on corrupt leadership. Thanks to agents stepping up, the truth is coming out. Transparency. Justice. Accountability.”
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The FBI declined to comment on a HuffPost query asking how Patel believes then-director Christopher Wray should have responded to an ongoing attack on the Capitol and the U.S. Constitution.
“These people are so un-American, and just totally unhinged,” Cobb said.
Trump began lying about the 2020 election the very night he lost it to Democrat Joe Biden, claiming that he had won while votes were still being tabulated across the country and demanding the count be stopped.
He lost dozens of lawsuits designed to overturn the result and then oversaw a scheme to have his allies in various key states won by Biden send in slates of pro-Trump Electoral College votes. He then pressured then-Vice President Mike Pence to use those instead of the Biden slates. The plan fell apart when Pence refused to go along, and Trump responded by turning his mob against Pence.
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The violence lasted hours before the police could regain control of the Capitol, and in the process, 140 officers suffered injuries. One died hours later, and four others died by suicide in the coming weeks.
Trump, nevertheless, within weeks was back to lying that the election had been stolen from him. His falsehoods over the months started gaining traction in pro-Trump media and then among Republicans more broadly, particularly after ally Tucker Carlson produced a “documentary” claiming that the violence had actually been instigated by federal agents.
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Trump’s new lie about the 274 FBI agents is essentially an updated version of that Carlson conspiracy theory.
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“President Trump is, bizarrely and without evidence, accusing hundreds of FBI agents of acting as ‘Agitators and Insurrectionists.’ This is an intriguing development because Trump was himself a major ‘agitator,’ and was impeached by the House of Representatives for inciting insurrection against the union,” said Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, a member of the House Jan. 6 committee and a member now of the Republican-created committee to investigate that original committee.
“If President Trump really wants to get to the bottom of all the unanswered questions from Jan. 6, he should do what he refused to do at his second Senate impeachment trial,” Raskin said. “Come and testify before Congress and submit to thorough questioning under oath.”